Virtualization

There's a real battle in the virtualization market as VMware positions itself as cloud computing's operating system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is gaining traction and players like Citrix and Red Hat are also a threat. Virtualization's main selling point - the ability to use more computing capacity and save on servers - resonates for obvious reasons.

There's nothing like a live demo to convince you one way or another about a technology. Watch a real-time, live demo of VMware's Horizon with View in a Hands-on Lab to see for yourself if you'd like to deploy a traditional VDI solution for your company.

Analysts warn that VMware will face increasing competition from startups and established cloud players, but VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says its focus on providing "value" via its products will keep these rivals at bay.

At a Churchill Club event in Santa Clara, Calif., Peter Solvik, managing director at Sigma Partners, asks a panel of CIOs whether virtualization is ready for primetime. The panel includes: Matt Carey, chief information officer of Home Depot; Karenann Terrell, CIO of Baxter; and Lars Rabbe, former CIO of Yahoo. The IT chiefs discuss server-level and desktop virtualization and how the technology is helping their businesses run more efficiently.

By 2011, there could be more than 660 million virtualized desktops. John Whaley, CTO and Founder of MokaFive, talks about the issues surrounding current infrastructures and says that organizations deploying new systems need to think about four things--management, offline use, cost, and the user experience.

Mike Seashols, Chairman of VirtualLogix, talks about implementing virtualization technologies onto mobile platforms. He says there are many issues that mobile providers have to think about--like time to market, cost, and the ability to update devices.

At a Churchill Club event in Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talks to Ann Winblad, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, about Microsoft's move into virtualization with its new Hyper-V technology. He also shares his thoughts on increasing the overall market and how his company differs from its biggest competitor, VMware.

At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Jeffrey Birnbaum, managing director and chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, speaks about using cloud computing to reduce the complexities and costs of financial services. He discusses the move away from dedicated machines and why old ideas like virtualization have become useful again.

Sponsored: Christian Black, an IT systems engineer for Intel, spells out the many benefits of hard-drive virtualization, or operating system streaming, including faster boot times and longer desktop life.The content for this video was sponsored and provided by Intel.

At the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, Peter Williams, CTO of IBM's Big Green Innovations, discusses the role of technology in the green movement. He addresses everything from new virtualization systems to new sensor networks that will help monitor climate change.

Diane Offereins, CIO at Discover Financial Services speaks to ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about the company's underdog role in the financial services industry. She also talks about deploying new technologies that will help spur growth and gain efficiencies, such as virtualization, web services, and mobile payments.